The town folded itself around us like a polite stranger.
We stepped off the train with the same small pile of our lives and the world looked unfamiliar in ways that were not merely physical. The station smelled of diesel and boiled tea and the particular dust of places people pass through without staying. Farid walked with his shoulders set as if they could carry more than bundles; his silence had the patient weight of decisions already made. Tooba kept hold of a small trunk as if it were a child; Toora balanced a small satchel of medicines on her shoulder. Ufaq watched the faces of the people who moved past us, cataloguing strangers with the same cool, efficient look she reserved for ledgers.
Our new room waited above a narrow shop on a street that had not learned to mind its comings and goings. The landlord an elderly man who kept his voice in the door instead of the house showed us the key with a politeness that felt like a transaction rather than welcome. The stairwell smelled of lemon oil and old paint; each step was a minor announcement of a life being moved. When the door opened the room looked at us: whitewashed walls, a single bulb in the ceiling, a narrow bed with a sheet that had been ironed flat enough to look hopeful, and a little window that showed a slice of sky and the top of another building. The air inside had the sterile hush of a place that had been kept empty too long.
There is a bluntness to sterile rooms: they do not flatter, they only hold. They are honest about what a life can afford right now. Farid set down the bundles and checked the locks the way a man measures safety by how many clicks a door makes. He had the same small gestures as always arranging a kettle on a shelf, finding a nail to hang a prayer of sorts except his hands trembled once when he set a cup down and then steadied. Pride does not break at once; it winnows, it folds into small, private adjustments.
I walked the perimeter of the room as if I could take its measurements with my skin. The sheet smelled faintly of starch; the little table by the window had a scratch that might have been a lover's initials once or a child's bored score. The light through the window fell in a strip across the floor and made the dust motes look like a city of tiny islands. Outside, the street was a new orchestra: hawkers selling roti, a bicycle bell, the distant chant of a morning prayer. Everything was the same machinery of life, unfamiliar only because we were new parts inside it.
Tooba opened the trunk first. She is the kind of sister who unpacks with the same concentration she stitches everything in its small place. She folded shirts and stacked them like a small altar. Her movements are practical, not theatrical; that steadiness steadies the rest of us. Toora arranged a small jar of balm on the table and set a clean handkerchief beside it as if to agree that wounds are to be tended wherever you are. Ufaq found the corner where signals from the street reached the window quickest and sat there, listening. Even in the newness she found a map.
We asked for neighbors' names at the shop below and learned our landlord's was Khurram and that his wife ran a tiny tea stall at the market a few blocks down. Names are the first small bridges. A woman from next door only the barest outline of a neighbor poked her head through the stairwell and offered a dish wrapped in waxed paper. She did not ask our story. She slid the parcel into Tooba's hands and retreated. The gesture was a small, neutral welcome: food, always food, the currency of first attention.
There was an odd slackening to speech that afternoon. None of us demanded much. Farid took out a small, careful sum and handed it to Khurram with the ungraceful dignity of a man who gives away the thing he thought would keep his family in place. Khurram tapped a finger on the register, nodded, and then showed us where the tap for water worked best. The gestures were efficient; they meant arrangements had been made. Arrangements are not peace, but they are a stage where peace might begin sometime later.
At dusk the city's noises changed tempo. Children chased one another in the lane below; a man with a radio walked slowly, the music leaking out like a neighborly confidence. The room felt smaller then, not in a cruel way but in a way that made us notice things we had not in the house we left: a crack in the plaster that would make a rainstorm vexing, the way the window did not close tightly, the thinness of the mattress. Small inconveniences, and each one a kind of homework for survival.
We lit a small stove and Tooba cooked a simple meal with the fragments we had left accessible: lentils, slices of stale bread made fragrant over the flame, a handful of spice. Food tasted differently in a new place it tasted of adaptation and of the small triumph of work done by hand. We ate in a circle on the floor because there was no table wide enough for us and because the floor felt steadier under bare feet. Conversation hovered in small eddies: instructions about where to buy tea, jokes about what we would learn to do differently, the practicalness of tomorrow's errands. No one spoke of the roof we had left other than in the cadence of necessary inventory what we would miss and what we had taken.
When the town dimmed I went out onto the narrow window ledge and let the air touch my face. The skyline here was a mosaic of satellite dishes and laundry lines, and between them a flock of pigeons angled like a slow apology. I thought of the notebook still folded into the lining of my shawl. I had not opened it yet; that moment would come, and when it did the lines would begin. For now the pages lay like a silence waiting to be inscribed.
We did not close our night with loud proclamations. We tidied what we could; Farid checked the lock twice more as if the clicking agreed to be our companion. Then, in the small, private ceremony we had come to by habit, we sat together like people practicing a new ritual: small talk, then a prayer muttered under breath, then sleep. The bed was thin but not unkind. I wrapped the shawl Tooba had sewn more tightly and felt the thread pull like a small promise.
Before sleep I watched the lamplight of another window flare and go out again. The town was not hostile. It simply required industry and proof of presence; it wanted clients for its tea stalls and meters for its electricity and bodies to fill its rooms. We were, for now, among them. That knowledge was not balm, only fact. Fact is what I am learning to depend on.
In the dark I felt the shape of a ledger forming not in paper but in mind: names, times, first small favors, the faces that offered them. I did not write that night. I slept with the book close and let myself be carried by the quiet rhythm of a room not built by us. Arrival is, I said quietly to myself, the first small proof that removal does not erase memory. Tomorrow the ink would wait.